Playing around with settings in Terminal is a time honored tradition amongst tinkerers, but that doesn’t make any of those commands any less obtuse. M-cli is a tool that provides you with several plain language commands for common actions.

Have you somehow managed to customize your Mac’s Dock to an unusable state? Or perhaps you’re just longing for instant access to all that Apple software? If so, Defaults-Write points out you can get your default Dock back easily.

Time Machine is a great service for backing up your computer, and by default it doesn’t use much CPU power to do it. That’s great most of the time, but sometimes you need to get stuff backed up as soon as possible. Defaults-Write points out the Terminal command for doing so.

Usually, when an app crashes in OS X, you get a pop up warning from Crash Reporter in the middle of the screen. That’s not always the best place for it, and if you’d prefer to have the warning in your Notification Center, Defaults-Write shows you how.

If you’re getting ready to set up a new computer or you need to format an old one, it’s useful to get a quick glimpse at everything you have installed so you can easily reinstall them later. OS X Daily shows how to do it with a Terminal command.

OS X: FileVault does a great job of protecting your Mac. Every time you boot up, it asks for your password. If you're troubleshooting or providing remote support, though, entering it every time is a pain. Luckily, you can bypass the password requirement one time with this terminal command.

Merging folders on a Mac is kind of a pain. When you do it, Finder tries to overwrite any file with the same name with the newer version. That means it's easy to accidentally erase a whole folder. How-To Geek shows off a better way to merge folders using Terminal.

Macs all come packed with the System Information app, which is great for getting all kinds of information about your computer. Unfortunately, it's also kind of tough to find what you're looking for sometimes. To get this info quick, The Instructional shows how to access it from Terminal.

Sometimes your files have overstayed their welcome and they just need to go and you want them to go as fast as possible. Or you just want to delete everything that starts with a certain word. Or some files refuse to go into the trash/recycling bin. Let the command line come to your rescue.

Sometimes when you're working in the command line you need to enter "sudo" to assume root privileges for a given task. You may not always remember, but one little trick can save you from retyping your last command with "sudo" prefixed to it.

You probably know about the internet speed tests that can be performed from your browser. However, Make Tech Easier shows us that you can do the same thing right from a terminal window—perfect for your Raspberry Pi or home server.